


Better Than None

by stratumgermanitivum



Series: His And Mine Are The Same [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-10
Updated: 2018-10-10
Packaged: 2019-07-29 02:34:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16254923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stratumgermanitivum/pseuds/stratumgermanitivum
Summary: Will’s soulmark is inconvenient. It splays across the knuckles of his right hand, a blue-black ink stain. When he walks through a crowd, he has to constantly check his hand to make sure he hasn’t touched anyone. They say you feel it, when you connect, but Will checks anyway. There are a thousand ways to accidentally brush your knuckles against someone, and even Will, as solitary as he is,  yearns for the connection the mark promises him. Most days. Some days, he stares at his tinted skin and worries about what kind of person would be matched to a man likehim.





	Better Than None

Will’s soulmark is inconvenient. It splays across the knuckles of his right hand, a blue-black ink stain. When he walks through a crowd, he has to constantly check his hand to make sure he hasn’t touched anyone. They say you feel it, when you connect, but Will checks anyway. There are a thousand ways to accidentally brush your knuckles against someone, and even Will, as solitary as he is, yearns for the connection the mark promises him. Most days. Some days, he stares at his tinted skin and worries about what kind of person would be matched to a man like _him._

Jack Crawford’s soulmark covers the entire palm of his right hand, right up and over his fingertips. He’s matched, the onyx-dark color fading to the more subtle tone of a birthmark, just a few shades darker than his natural skin tone. It’s the first thing Will notices when Jack walks into his lecture hall, holding out his hand to shake. Easy to notice when you’re always looking down.

“We need your help,” Jack tells him, an easy smile on his face like he knows Will can’t say no.

“You don’t need me. You’ve got Alana Bloom at Georgetown, go ask her, she does the same thing I do. There are dozens of people you could call in on this, behavioral science is not a small field.”

“She doesn’t do what you do. No one does what you do. You make leaps you can’t explain.”

“No, the evidence explains.”

“Then find me some.”

And Jack is right, Will can’t say no. Because he is alone with his dogs and his classes, and this is the only thing useful or good he can do with his life. This is what he’s skilled at. What he was meant for.

\-----  
The missing girls all look the same, wind-chafed, dark-haired, same height, same weight.

“He could be looking for his soulmate,” Jack suggests, “They’re all unmatched.”

“They wouldn’t look the same then, he’d branch out. Broaden his palate.” Will shakes his head, leaning in to examine the latest photo. Elise Nichols, just a hint of her soulmark visible against her collarbone, the rest dipping under the shoulder of her sweater. The kind of girl who’d wear nothing but spaghetti-strap tops the second the weather turned warm, just to make sure she didn’t miss her chance. Young and sweet, carefree and going nowhere but up.

“It’s not about them. It’s about just one girl, one specific girl. He’d hide how special she was.” Will doesn’t look up, doesn’t need to. He knows without looking the way people’s faces twist when he speaks, says the dark things that pop into his head. “I would. Wouldn’t you?”

\-----  
Will meets Hannibal Lecter for the first time on a day he’s had almost no sleep, and not nearly enough coffee. It’s not entirely his fault, therefor, that he’s in a bit of a mood.

“It’s alright,” Hannibal says, “Everyone has a little trouble at first.”

“It’s not you,” Will protests. He hasn’t actually looked Hannibal in the face yet, gaze stuck on the well-tended leather of his shoes.

“Not a fan of eye contact?”

Will looks up and catches his breath. Hannibal’s soulmark is a lover’s touch across his left cheek, right over the cheekbone, too dark to be a bruise, but unsettling at first glance regardless. Soulmarks are more often around the hands and arms. The face isn’t altogether uncommon, but it still always takes Will a moment to adjust. It’s right beneath his eye, jet black and broad, and Will finds himself caught in that look.

This is the first mistake.

\----  
The scar her father leaves on her neck crosses right across Abigail’s soulmark, a strip of lighter skin ripped through the black.

“I’ll have to cover it now.” She tells Will, fidgeting with a scarf. “I don’t know how they’re going to find me.”

“They’ll find you,” Will promises.

“Yours hasn’t found you yet. Doctor Lecter still has his, and he’s older than you are.”

“Then you have a long time to catch up.”

Abigail frowns, rubbing her fingers over and over the edge of the scarf in a soft, rhythmic motion. “Did you know 12% of soulmates never connect? People die, or purposefully cover up their marks, or they just get stuck on the wrong side of chance.”

Will reaches out, touches her hand, feels the way her pulse skitters and shakes beneath the skin. “You’ve got time, Abigail,” He says softly, “You’ve got all the time in the world.”

\-----  
Will doesn’t really like to touch people. It’s not that uncommon; many people find touch to be intimate. It’s more than that for Will, though. Touch feels heavy, grating. He has to prepare himself for it, bracing in advance. Some people are harder than others.

Alana can touch him. He’s known her for a while, harbors a bit of a crush on her, with her soft skin and her pretty, soulmark-dark lips that lipsticks only ever tint, never properly cover.

Abigail can touch him too, though she almost never does. A hand on his arm when he’s on his way out the door, bringing him up short to say a shy goodbye.

Jack touches heavy and rough. He does it to everyone, a pat on the back or the shoulder while out in the field. It feels like a brick coming down on Will’s body.

Hannibal, Will is trying to adjust to. He seems to be a far more tactile person than Will is. Will has seen him run a hand through Abigail’s hair, rub a thumb gently over her knuckles. He’s less demonstrative with Will, but the touches are still there, felt warm through Will’s shirt when he steadies him at a crime scene. No sandpaper touches here, just surprise. Shock that someone wants to touch him this much, someone wants to befriend him and show up when Will needs them.

Will is unused to friendship, but he thinks he could get used to Hannibal.

\-----

Will has noticed that once people match, they tend to be drawn to their soulmarks, over and over again, reliving the connection. Zeller and Price matched in an accidental brush in a crowded elevator years before Will met them. Their soulmarks are faint reddish blotches along the outside of their arms. They’re entirely professional at work, Will wouldn’t have even known if someone hadn’t told him, but now he can see it. They circle each other without even looking, working in tandem around a crime scene or an autopsy, but every time they pass each other their arms brush, like they’re reassuring themselves that the other is still there.

Alana will have it easy, with her pretty, darkened lips. It’s no hardship, to kiss your soulmate. Will wonders if it’s been ruined for Abigail, if she’ll ever want someone to touch the scar on her throat even once, let alone a constant brush of skin reminding her over and over again of metal and copper and the sound of gunshots.

Will tries to imagine his own soulmate, imagine himself brushing his knuckles against someone’s skin as he passes, like Price and Zeller. Maybe running his hand over someone’s shoulder or the back of their neck as they sit in bed and read.

He can’t picture it. He, who can imagine anything, cannot imagine wanting so badly to touch someone, wanting it so much that his insides twist and ache until they’re all he can think about. Will cannot imagine a love like that, cannot describe color to someone who is blind.

\-----  
Tobias Budge has a soulmark. It spreads pitch-black across the inside of his wrist, peeking out from under the sleeve of his shirt as he lies dead on the floor of Hannibal’s office.

Intellectually, Will had known he would have one. Of course he would. Soulmarks are a possibility, not a guarantee, and everyone has possibility.

But the reality of it is still startling, still makes him pause and stare at the body.

Tobias Budge was a warped thing. He laughed and smiled and talked without a hint of emotion in his eyes. He ripped a man open and played music from his throat, ripped others open and used them to string up other instruments. And somewhere out there is someone who would have been perfect for him, someone who perhaps could have understood and guided him towards something better. Or, maybe, who could have reveled in darkness and blood with him until the devil came to claim them.

Will thinks of his own mind, his twisting turning line-up of killers he can put on and take off like a faded favorite T-shirt. His hallucinations and night terrors. Will thinks of killing Garrett Jacob Hobbs and wanting to do it again and again and _again_.

Somewhere out there is someone who will understand that. Will thinks that maybe there shouldn’t be. He lies awake that night and runs the knuckles of his right hand over his own racing heart.

\-----  
Will has never tried to kiss Alana Bloom, because he knows how futile it would be. People date outside of a matched pair. Some people don’t match until late in life, if ever, and no one wants to be alone. But Alana is a romantic, and who wouldn’t be with a soulmate like hers? Alana is a romantic, and Will is fucked up. Alana is a romantic, and Will sees antlers and dead men following him wherever he goes.

Will has never tried to kiss Alana Bloom, and so the future twists, bends, ripple effects from a butterfly’s wings. Will has never tried to kiss Alana Bloom, and so he has sought out someone else for stability, a grasp at control over his pounding head. The day he ripped his chimney open to find nothing but dusty darkness, he called Hannibal instead. And Hannibal had come, had placed a hand on his shoulder and reassured him.

Will had thought about it, after Tobias Budge. Will had run his fingers over the spot on his shoulder, just aside his collarbone, and let himself feel assured. It had worked. He felt anchored even as the world was collapsing around him. And so the next time his head started to melt atop his shoulders, he went to Hannibal again. Drank wine and ate good food and let someone tell him he was stressed, traumatized, that it could get better if he just quit.

He was not going to quit, but at least this way it felt like something he had control over. Something terrifying, something that would probably kill him, but something he had chosen.

This is the second mistake.

\-----

Will makes his third mistake on a dark, cold night, storming through the door to Hannibal’s office: He tells no one his suspicions, tells no one where he’s going. He goes to Hannibal alone, unarmed, because he has always run to Hannibal when things go wrong.

“Abigail Hobbs killed Nicholas Boyle,” Will says, and outright growls when surprise fails to materialize on Hannibal’s face.

“I know.”

Will stalks across the room, predator for prey that does not fear him. “Tell me _why_ you know.”

“I helped her bury the body.”

It is nothing unexpected. It has been telegraphed in every piece of Hannibal, in the way he looked with his hands buried in a body in the back of an ambulance. In the way he watches Will when he eats.

Will has seen more of Hannibal than anyone else, has called him for every hallucination, every moment of lost time.

He knows what Hannibal looks like when he’s worried. This is not worry. This is calculation.

Will has been piecing it together in every stolen moment. Now, he crosses to the window and stares out, back to Hannibal. Letting Hannibal make the next move.

“You’re the Chesapeake Ripper.” He says, prodding Hannibal towards action.

“A bold accusation, Will.”

“An accurate one. You’re a surgeon who knew how to hide a body, well enough that a teenage girl had to go dig it up before anyone even noticed.”

“Have you told anyone else?” Hannibal’s voice is whisper-soft, near Will’s ear, and they are still not touching.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I didn’t want them to take you away.”

Will feels the sharp prick of a syringe in his neck, just before Hannibal hesitates, thrown by Will’s words. Will whirls around and the needle goes flying before Hannibal gets to depress the plunger, a small miracle in a godless night. Hannibal has a split second to look shocked before Will punches him in the face.

Hannibal drags Will with him when he goes down, clutching to Will’s sleeve. He looks up with wide eyes and a pale-pink mark across his cheek bone. Will’s knuckles are still tingling.

Hannibal glances down at Will’s fist as he shakes out the feeling, then brings a hand up to caress his own cheek. It will bruise, dark and violent, but for now his soulmark is a beautiful, matched birthmark. Will resists the unexpected urge to bite at it, redden it further.

“You knew,” Hannibal says, shock and awe and admiration, all in one.

“I suspected,” Will corrects, “When I realized your artwork was beautiful instead of terrifying. Did you know you’ve never touched me?”

“I touch you all the time. You thrive under physical reassurance.”

“Through my clothes. My shoulder or my arm. Never anywhere else.”

“You could have tested your theory more subtly.”

Will could have. He imagines it, a soft brush of his knuckles over Hannibal’s cheek. A kiss. Electricity he could feel instead of overshadowing it with pain.

But this is who they are. This is what they become, together.

“You deserved the punch. Abigail and the Ripper weren’t the only things you were keeping from me, were they?”

Hannibal hesitates, as if he actually thinks he can lie his way out of this. As if he thinks he can lie to Will ever again, now that Will sees into the heart of him.

“You have encephalitis. An infection, in your brain.” Because of _course_ Will does, of course he’s not actually crazy. Or maybe he is. He’s still here, after all.

“Just… Just shut up, Hannibal.”

Will makes his fourth mistake when he kisses Hannibal, right over the reddened skin of his bruising soulmark. He’s ruined his life forever. There’s no going back now, no pretending he doesn’t know, or turning Hannibal in.

He doesn’t regret it.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote 90% of this like two months ago. Then I ignored it entirely until I found it again this morning and wrote the last scene just because I was sick of having it on my computer. So I can't speak to the quality of it, although I don't think it's that bad. 
> 
> Prompt is from [this tumblr post](http://stratumgermanitivum.tumblr.com/post/175990757784/otp-113). Title is from Kiss With A Fist by Florence + the Machine, specifically 'A kick in the teeth is good for some, a kiss with a fist is better than none.' ((The document on my computer is actually titled 'Kiss With A Fist' but I decided to be a bit more subtle/delicate.))
> 
> This was originally going to be part of a series with More Myself Than I Am in which I wrote various soulmate tropes, but I ended up moving past that idea. So it's just these two. For now.
> 
> ((Margot ended up not getting a chance to show up, but her soulmate is a lipstick print across her cheek, by the way. She used to hate it because Mason delighted in it, but after she meets Alana she learns to love it as Alana kisses her there every single chance she gets.))


End file.
